Congrats to Barbara Liskov
Barbara Liskov, professor of computer science at MIT, was recently awarded the Association for Computing Machinery’s A.M. Turing Award. The Turing Award is much like the Nobel Prize for computing research, and in this case it was awarded for her “contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing.”
Professor Liskov was the first woman in the United States to receive a PhD in computer science, and she went on to develop new ideas in using abstraction in programming. For software testers, however, she has also developed new techniques for improving fault tolerance in distributed computing systems. From Dr. Dobb’s:
Her most recent research focuses on techniques that enable a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of some of its components. Her work on practical Byzantine fault tolerance demonstrated that there were more efficient ways of dealing with arbitrary (Byzantine) failures than had been previously known. Her insights have helped build robust, fault-tolerant distributed systems that are resistant to errors and hacking. This research is likely to change the way distributed system designers think about providing reliable service on today’s modern, vulnerable Internet.
Her ideas will no doubt influence how distributed, grid, and cloud computing systems are both developed and tested. Congratulations to Professor Liskov for winning such an amazing prize!
